I'm pretty sure our bone of contention starts and ends here:
I think that's an astute observation, even if I disagree with you on whether it's a left-right issue.
But the way I see it, nobody forces companies to be publicly traded and benefit from limited liability. If the companies' owners think that the demands that society places upon them in return for these privileges are too onerous, they are perfectly free to withdraw the company from the Exchange, as provided for by the applicable rules.
More generally, I don't think that property scales. I have nothing against the corner-store owner with two employees deciding how he wants to run his business - he doesn't have notably more bargaining power than his employees do individually. But when a company spans an entire country and employs hundreds of people... then it becomes a political entity, as much as a commercial one. And then different rules apply. Or ought to apply.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
It's no longer purely a private concern. The mythology that it should be a private concern, irrespective of social and political influence, is one of the flawed neo-feudal cornerstones of the rightwing edifice.
I wonder if even rightwingers still claim that, regarding multinationals and other giant companies.
Yes. Unfortunately, they do.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go take a shower.
It remains that even from a rightwing point of view, monopolies and multinationals are an obvious obstacle to healthy competition. I mean, either you're a freemarketeer, or you're not.
I would think so too. But apparently I'm wrong, at least according to several people I know whose credentials as "right-wingers" I have no reason to doubt (their sanity, yes, but not their political leanings).
There exists an unfortunately influential ideology in some right-wing circles that says that regulation of transnational companies is a greater imposition on personal liberty than permitting these transnational companies to run wild. The same doctrine also states that the "free" in "free market" means "free from government intervention," but does not say anything about freedom from exercise of monopoly power (the Austrian school of thought [I use the term loosely] even deny that monopolies can exercise power).
I wonder if the circles circulating this doctrine would exist elsewhere than the United States. Due to many factors, the idea that the state is "bad" in principle is unfortunately almost cosubstantial with the US. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
